|
The Point of it All
Signatures of Grace:
Catholic Writers on the Sacraments
Edited by Thomas Grady and Paula Huston. With essays by: Murray Bodo, O.F.M., Andre Dubus, Mary Gordon, Patricia Hampl, Ron Hansen, Paula Huston, Paul Mariani, and Katharine Vaz
Dutton, 2000. 232 pages.
Reviewed by John Monczunski
With all due respect to Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and theologians everywhere I must confess that my mind, like an angel’s wings, floats off the page whenever I encounter a word like ecclesiology or eschaton. Every profession, of course, has specialized language to communicate its truths as precisely as possible. This is as it should and must be. However, given the choice between a theological treatise and a good story, you can guess which book I’ll have my nose in. I suspect I’m not alone.
Thomas Grady and Paula Huston had the same suspicion. The editor and writer, both serious Catholics, became friends at a writer’s conference, discovered their mutual interest in the faith and got the bright idea to ask some of the best Catholic authors to write about the sacraments. “[W]ho better than a novelist or a poet to understand the experience of these ‘signs,’ each of which is associated with such earthly realities as water, oil, bread and wine?” they ask in the preface to their book. Precisely. Who, indeed?
Grady and Huston have assembled an all-star cast, all distinguished and acclaimed writers, some even best-selling. The lineup includes a finalist for the National Book Award (Ron Hansen), arecipient of the PEN/Malamud award (Andre Dubus), a Pushcart Prize winner (Patricia Hampl), and an O.Henry Prize winner (Mary Gordon).
The book consists of eight essays, one on each of the seven sacraments recognized by the Catholic church (Baptism, Penance, Holy Eucharist, Confirmation, Matrimony, Holy Orders, and Annointing of the Sick) plus an epilogue. All are original contributions, with the exception of the epilogue by the late Andre Dubus. His essay was originally published in Meditations from a Moveable Chair, his final bookbefore his death in 1999.
Most of the essays share a similar rhythm: the author recalls his or her earliest memory of the sacrament, discusses its historical and theological underpinnings, and shares his or her experience and understanding of the sacrament. Nestled in the essays are some interesting theological factoids: Matrimony wasn’t recognized as a sacrament until the thirteenth century; Penance originally was seen as a once in a lifetime sacrament.
Because the writers are of a certain ( i.e. middle) age, they have a unique perspective. With childhoods formed by the Tridentine Latin church and adulthoods lived in the post-Vatican II church they have firsthand knowledge of the evolution of the sacraments. Hansen, Hampl, and Gordon are especially good at setting the church scene of the 1950s.
Describing his First Communion “uniform” (which could have been my own) Hansen writes, “We second graders wore new shoes, navy blue slacks, white shirts with red cufflinks and white clip-on ties. We’d slicked hair with Wildroot Creme oil. We felt spiffy.”
At their best the authors offer up vivid incarnate detail, stories, showing how the spiritual manifests in the material world, how the sacraments have been experienced by these articulate people, how the sacred rites have changed them. As Murray Boddo notes in his essay on Holy Orders, “Sacraments are . . . physical signs that impart grace, which is mostly inward and profoundly spiritual. The physical is all we perceive; the spiritual is evident only in the metamorphoses that take place in our lives, the faith, the hope, the charity we cannot explain by means of purely human reason.”
Precisely because the writers are not theologians, their insights sometimes take an unexpected twist. When Patricia Hampl came back to the sacrament of Penance after, as she says, “a lapse of 30 or 32 years,” a monk told her the sacrament isn’t really about sin. It’s about hardness of heart. This, she realizes, includes “The burnt sacrifices of self-castigation, of blame and shame, all the slaughters on the high altar of the self that it is possible to present as one’s truth. It is a modern form of hard heartedness, earnest but rigid.”
Katharine Vaz examines Baptism in light of the deaths of her grandmother and a friend. Baptism, she points out, stands everything we thought we knew about the world on its head.
“This sacrament condenses the tenets of the Christian faithChrist was born, crucified, buried and rose again in the flesh,” she writes. “We are asked to die in water and come out living. . . . That is the expansive message of Baptism. Everything, all at once, attendant upon grace. Instead of viewing existence as a series of moments lined up like beads on a string, to be flung away in terror when we reach the last one, we are asked to see a constant mesh of life and death, the visible and invisible. We are enjoined to rejoice with more fervor by not being afraid of detecting that death is barnacled to every single day from birth. Baptism proclaims this in brazen fullness.”
Writing on Matrimony, Paula Huston spends the bulk of her essay discussing her quest to convert to Catholicism, which necessitated the annulment of her first marriage. Through the story of her failings she offers up a via negativa, what her marraige was not and what Matrimony is.
Andre Dubus closes the book declaring there are actually “seven times 70 sacraments to infinity.” Even a telephone call can be a sacrament, he insists. “A sacrament is physical and within it is God’s love; as a sandwich is physical and within it is love, if someone makes it for you and gives it to you with love.”
All creation is a sacrament and love is the point of it all.
John Monczunski is a writer and editor living in South Bend, Indiana. He is at work on Tales of the ’hound, an account of a 30-day bus pilgrimage around the United States in search of the sacred.
|
